Your Money Is Not the Government's Money

Government Contracts, Public Funds, and the Duty to Account for Every Dollar

Campaign Briefing: Structural Reforms for Trustworthy Governance

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

April 8, 2026

I. A Simple Principle That Got Lost

The federal government does not have its own money. It has yours.

Every contract it signs, every vendor it selects, every dollar it spends — that is money taken from American taxpayers through the constitutional authority of Congress and entrusted to the executive branch to spend on the public's behalf. Not on the government's behalf. Not on the administration's behalf. Yours.

When that principle is honored, government spending is a public investment. When it is forgotten — when contracts flow to the connected rather than the qualified, when subcontractors are buried under layers of opacity, when billions are spent in ways that cannot be traced or explained — spending becomes extraction. And the people who fund it are the last to know.

This administration proposes a rule so simple it should not need to be said: if it is public money, it is public information.

II. What Opacity in Contracting Actually Costs

The federal government is the largest buyer of goods and services in the world. More than half a trillion dollars in contracts flow through the system every year. That scale creates enormous opportunity — to build things, to employ people, to strengthen communities and advance national capability. It also creates enormous opportunity for waste, fraud, and the quiet conversion of public resources into private gain.

When contracting is opaque, accountability evaporates. A prime contractor wins the award.

The real work is done by subcontractors the public cannot identify, at prices the public cannot evaluate, toward outcomes the public cannot verify. The federal audit system is overworked, underfunded, and consistently behind. By the time an Inspector General flags a problem, the money is gone and the people responsible are working on the next contract.

This is not a partisan problem. It happens under administrations of every stripe. It is a structural problem, and it requires a structural fix.

III. What This Administration Will Do

First: mandatory subcontractor transparency. Every entity receiving federal contract dollars — at every tier — will be required to register in a public database linked to the primary contract. The public will be able to follow the money from the award all the way down the contracting chain. No more layers of anonymity.

Second: a Contract Integrity Dashboard. The General Services Administration will host a single, filterable public platform linking existing federal databases — SAM.gov, the Federal Procurement Data System, and the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System — into a coherent, searchable tool that any citizen can use to see who received federal contracts, for what, at what cost, and how well they performed.

Third: a federal Civil Service Restoration Act to cap contracted personnel at 15 percent of agency headcount for core national functions, and to require that roles involving national security, sensitive intelligence, or direct command authority be held by federal employees — not private contractors. Some work belongs to the government. Not to a vendor.

Fourth: wage parity enforcement. Federal contract workers performing equivalent functions to career federal employees will be compensated equivalently. The contracting system should not be used to pay people less for the same work because they happen to be employed by a firm rather than a department.

IV. What This Ends

It ends the era of contracts awarded to firms whose primary qualification was proximity to power. It ends the practice of burying accountability under layers of subcontracting until no one is responsible for anything. It ends the fiction that government can outsource its core functions to private entities and still be held accountable for the results.

The American people have a right to know where their money went. Not in a report published eighteen months after the fact. In real time, in plain language, in a format they can actually use.

Government contracting must reflect the will of the people who fund it — not the convenience of the firms that profit from it.

If it is public money, it is public information. That is the standard. That is the commitment.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN